Stage 5: Select papers from other students to read that interest you; learn from them Comment constructively on others' papers and add what you can to everyone's knowledge. Reply to comments about your own papers. Complete a self assessment of participation
Make contributions to the conference, not in online discussion forums
No Class - do it online!
Make contributions to the conference, not in online discussion forums
No Class - do it online!
Preparation for the final assignment due on Monday Week 14
Reading:
Wellman, Barry (2001).Physical Place & Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking
Reading:
Wellman, Barry (2001).Physical Place & Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking
I have read a lot over the past two months, but nothing attracted me more than this reading. What fascinates me most about it is that it leaves me with a feeling of loneliness and isolation.
Wellman wrote this essay in 2001. Now, 11 years later things have dramatically changed. But Wellman has predicted a lot of developments rightly.
It never dawned on me that the biggest transition between the landline phone and the mobile phone was not so much that you din't have to connect it to a socket in the wall. Even more important, the mobile phone was geographically disconnected. A landline phone connected communities (households), being located in a geographically identifiable spot. Calling a landline phone you could never be sure who picked it up. A mobile phone is personalised. If someone calls, it is not to connect with a community, it is always about the individual - me. Basically the same thing happens online. Rather than having someone call us, we connect with our online-ID and its many personifications, spread across many Social Networking Services to find out who connected with us. Obviously our hunger for attention is insaturable. We can't get enough of it and the Web is a perfect place to celebrate ourselves.
But until today this never troubled me, until I read the following in the first paragraph of the chapter, "The Rise of Networked Individualism":
Moving around with a mobile phone made me almost completely independent of place. It was I-alone that was reachable where I was: at a house, hotel, office, freeway or mall. Place did not matter, the person did. The person has become the portal.
The situation resembles the experience that can be made online. It doesn't matter where I am or what time it is, I can connect when I want to by means of my online IDs with my tight relations.
But both mobile phone and the Web cannot make up for the physical attention we need as much as intellectual attention.
More and more people spend more time of their life online or with their mobile phone than with real people. Will we sacrifice bodily sensations for the sake of audio-visual personal attention? Is it of higher value to experience a large virtual audience than experiencing taste, smell and tactile sensations in a world we can emerge ourselves in?
Will real life matter anymore when we replace emotional human interaction with artificial replacements? I fear that becoming the portal will result in becoming a device.
---
Wellman wrote this essay in 2001. Now, 11 years later things have dramatically changed. But Wellman has predicted a lot of developments rightly.
It never dawned on me that the biggest transition between the landline phone and the mobile phone was not so much that you din't have to connect it to a socket in the wall. Even more important, the mobile phone was geographically disconnected. A landline phone connected communities (households), being located in a geographically identifiable spot. Calling a landline phone you could never be sure who picked it up. A mobile phone is personalised. If someone calls, it is not to connect with a community, it is always about the individual - me. Basically the same thing happens online. Rather than having someone call us, we connect with our online-ID and its many personifications, spread across many Social Networking Services to find out who connected with us. Obviously our hunger for attention is insaturable. We can't get enough of it and the Web is a perfect place to celebrate ourselves.
But until today this never troubled me, until I read the following in the first paragraph of the chapter, "The Rise of Networked Individualism":
Moving around with a mobile phone made me almost completely independent of place. It was I-alone that was reachable where I was: at a house, hotel, office, freeway or mall. Place did not matter, the person did. The person has become the portal.
The situation resembles the experience that can be made online. It doesn't matter where I am or what time it is, I can connect when I want to by means of my online IDs with my tight relations.
But both mobile phone and the Web cannot make up for the physical attention we need as much as intellectual attention.
More and more people spend more time of their life online or with their mobile phone than with real people. Will we sacrifice bodily sensations for the sake of audio-visual personal attention? Is it of higher value to experience a large virtual audience than experiencing taste, smell and tactile sensations in a world we can emerge ourselves in?
Will real life matter anymore when we replace emotional human interaction with artificial replacements? I fear that becoming the portal will result in becoming a device.
---
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